


Arm Maintenance Protocol

by rinnwrites



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 5 Times, Friday is a good bro, Kinda, M/M, Oblivious!Steve, Secret Relationship, Steve's Pov, Suspicious!Steve, Tony Fixing Bucky's Arm, workshop shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-02 00:40:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14532918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rinnwrites/pseuds/rinnwrites
Summary: Five times that Steve was suspicious about "arm maintenance", and one time that he decided to investigate.





	Arm Maintenance Protocol

**Author's Note:**

> 90% sure that this goes from past to present to past tense repeatedly. I'll fix it later. Whoops.

1.

The first time Steve thinks something is up, he doesn’t mention it to anyone. He’s been training with Bucky all day, and he’s heard the way the arm grinds. It doesn’t seem to be bringing Bucky any pain. Not as far as Steve can tell, at least. He still fights with a ferocity only matched by his Winter Soldier counterpart (no he does not take it easy on Steve just because they’re friends), and his motion isn’t hindered. It’s just the sound...not completely unlike nails on a chalkboard. 

Knowing that Buck’s got an appointment scheduled that day for Tony to work on the arm, Steve doesn’t feel the need to point it out. Anything that needed fixing could get fixed then.

It’s out of his mind until he passes Bucky in the hall. Steve’s on his way to dinner, and Bucky back towards their rooms. 

“Coming back down for dinner, Buck?” he asks easily, turning to walk backwards for a moment in anticipation of an answer. 

“Yep, make sure they save me some.” comes Bucky’s reply, along with a little mock salute. 

Steve freezes, there’s that grinding noise again. Why hadn’t Tony fixed it?

Bucky doesn’t seem to notice, and disappears into his room. 

Steve shakes his head, letting it go.

 

2.

The next time, an alert beeps insistently from the Stark Watch on Bucky’s wrist, and Steve watches his eyes fly open wide. Amused as the book he was reading falls from his hand. And he leaps to his feet. 

Steve shoots his friend a questioning glance, which is answered simply with “Arm maintenance. Late.” as the brunette is striding out the door, leaving Steve to complete his sketch of a pensively reading Bucky from memory rather than the real thing. 

He focuses on his drawing for a few long minutes, carefully smudging a shadow at his subject’s jaw, eventually glancing back up to the vacated chair out of habit. He notices a phone sitting there, likely fallen from Bucky’s pocket. (Ever since Tony’d given him one, Bucky had proven unskilled at keeping track of the contraption.)

“Hey FRIDAY?” he asks the ceiling, tone polite. 

“Captain.” Comes her immediate response.

“Can you get me Bucky and Tony?”

“I’m sorry Captain, under the Arm Maintenance protocol, Boss is not to be disturbed during his sessions with Sergeant Barnes.” she answers, almost apologetically. 

“Oh.” Steve replies, bewildered. “Give them a message for me?”

“Of course, Captain.”

He informs FRIDAY that Bucky’s phone is in the sitting room and goes back to drawing, though something about the enforced privacy nagged at the back of his mind. 

 

3.

Later, it’s Bruce who gets FRIDAY’s apology. The two of them are in a lab that Tony largely has outfitted for Bruce to do his work in peace and quiet, though the two could frequently be found discussing something that went  _ way _ over Steve’s head, eyes aglow with that “science is incredible” look they both got.

Today, however, Bruce was going through some old Super-Soldier Serum data and had asked Steve for some input. Steve had his reservations about what exactly Dr. Banner was trying to discover, or accomplish, but after everything he generally trusted the man, so he’d agreed to do whatever he could to help. 

“This is some of Howard’s shorthand, and I don’t entirely understand…” the doctor muttered under his breath before clearing his throat, “Hey FRIDAY, can you ask Tony to come up here?”

He gets the same “Arm Maintenance Protocol” answer from the AI, and Steve watches his face contort in confusion, too. 

“That’s odd.” the man mutters, already back to manipulating the numbers and charts in front of him. 

Banner seems content to accept that answer, but it’s  _ still _ nagging at Steve so he reiterates, “It  _ is _ odd, isn’t it?”

“Huh?” Bruce has clearly already moved on.

“It’s just a routine check-up, right? Why all the secrecy?” maybe he sounds petulant, but Steve has never liked being out of the loop, about anything.

Bruce looks up from the numbers in front of him and Steve can see the gears turning as he considers the situation. “Well…” he starts, leaning against the desk, “I suppose if he still has memories surfacing from years of HYDRA maintenance, that kind of situation could have Bucky on edge.”

Steve hums and tilts his head. It had been ages since he’d seen any dramatic effects from Bucky’s time with HYDRA. He was, for the most part, back to the man Steve had always known. 

“And you know Tony. He’s eccentric.”

That was an understatement, but Steve wasn’t really appeased. There was something going on here that he wasn’t seeing. 

 

4.

Its nearly a week later when Steve hears rustling in the room across the hall in the middle of the night. It’s not unusual, and Steve has long stopped trying to comfort Bucky when he wakes from nightmares. He’s come around to the fact that his friend didn’t need to be comforted the way he’d once comforted Steve when they were young and fragile. 

What’s strange is that moments later, the door opens, then closes, and Steve’s on his feet. 

When he opens his own bedroom door and pads barefooted into the hallway, Bucky turns. Sometimes Steve forgets that as acute as his enhanced hearing is, Bucky’s a match for him in most every way these days. 

“Steve.” Bucky says groggily, his flesh hand pushing unruly hair out of his sweat-slick face. He looks pale. 

“You alright, Buck?” he asks, concern flooding through him at the state his friend is in. 

“‘m fine,” he gestures to the metal arm swinging at his side. “Uh, arm’s keeping me up. Gonna see if Stark can do anything about it.”

He doesn’t seem very confident in his words, but is clearly uncomfortable, if the way he fidgets and shifts from one bare foot to the other is any indication, so Steve doesn’t push the issue. 

“Okay.” He wants to protest that it’s the middle of the night, but Tony was probably in the workshop anyway. He wants to ask what, specifically, is bothering Bucky about the arm, but he lets it go. “I’m here if you need anything, Bucky.” he says instead, sincerity plain in his words

Steve watches him slink down the dark hallway and into the elevator that would take him to the workshop. 

If he checks in with FRIDAY and gets the “Arm Maintenance Protocol” response a few moments later, no one needs to know that. 

 

5.

Movie night in the Avengers compound usually draws a crowd of older members and new recruits, but tonight it was largely the original members with the addition of Bucky and Vision, settling into the various sofas and chairs in the entertainment center. 

The opening credits for Transformers dance across the larger than life screen, and Steve’s seen this one before, something he found he could say pretty often since this became a team bonding ritual. 

He’s draped across an armchair, his neck resting on one arm while the crook of his knees hooks over the other. After everyone is settled and the initial chatter dies down, Steve’s focus lands on the movie, watching familiar but still interesting scenes unfold. He doesn’t know that he’ll ever get used to how far cinema has come in the past 80 years. 

The room is quiet except for the sound of the film, the exaggerated mechanical noises as Bumblebee transforms for the first time...and that’s when Steve realizes. It’s a little  _ too _ quiet. 

A glance back towards the rear of the room revealed an empty loveseat, where he was sure Tony and Bucky had settled on opposite sides before the start of the movie. It wasn’t like Tony to miss a chance to inform them all that he could easily turn Ironman into a transformer, a superior one, if he wanted to.

“Guys, where’s Tony and Bucky?” he asked the room at large, getting uninterested shrugs from most everyone. “FRIDAY?” he ventured, already half sure what she’d say. 

“Boss has activated Arm Maintenance Protocol, Captain.”

Steve crossed his arms in annoyance, brow wrinkling as he tried to figure out why they’d slip out in secret just to fix an arm malfunction. 

“That arm seems to need a heck of a lot of maintenance.” he muses, mostly to himself, looking up sharply at Natasha’s snort. “What?”

“The arm’s not all that’s being...maintained, if you catch my drift.”

It takes Steve a moment, but as a collective groan of distaste raises from the team it clicks and his eyes widen. “They’re not-”

Nat shushes him, waving his words away like she’s fanning smoke. 

He sits there for a moment, unable to process this information. She was certainly joking, wasn’t she? No one else seems to be affected at all by this information. 

Steve vows to figure it out once and for all. 

 

+1.

Two days later, Bucky has scheduled maintenance on his arm, Steve knows because he uses it as an excuse for not joining him and Sam on a run in the woods near the compound. 

He seizes the opportunity to get to the bottom of what’s going on with his friend, and sends a text to Sam, rescheduling their run for later in the evening. 

It’s a few minutes before 3:00pm when Bucky makes his way from the common floor down to the workshop and Steve watches him go. He considers sneaking up on them, but realizes that with FRIDAY observing every square inch of the place, that’s not exactly possible. 

After checking in with the AI and confirming that the infamous Arm Maintenance Protocol is active, he leisurely heads downstairs, taking the stairs themselves to give himself a moment to contemplate what he was about to walk into. 

If Natasha was right, he was  _ okay with that _ . He really was. Annoyed that Bucky didn’t feel like he could tell him about it. Concerned that his friend might thing Steve was holding on to the prejudices of the past rather than embracing the new rights of today’s world. That’s not who Steve was. He just wanted Bucky to be happy, and Tony, too. 

He just also wanted them to be honest. 

Before he realizes it, he’s outside of the glass doors, and to his surprise, they open in front of him.

Steve steps timidly into the room, hand arm raised up to cover his eyes as he does so. 

He’s about to call out for the pair when-

“Uh, you alright Stevie?” Bucky’s voice is totally innocent, if a bit bemused.

Steve drops his arm, blinking at the pair, who are blinking back at him, matching expressions of confusion on their faces.

They’re….doing arm maintenance. Tony’s on the other side of his workbench, he’s got a light grip on a tiny flat-headed screwdriver and Bucky sits across from him, arm stretched across the table to allow Tony to reach the access panel, his neck craned to look over his shoulder at Steve.

“Steve?” He asks again, and Steve realizes he’s just staring.

“I. Uh. I just.” He stutters, flushing as he tries to cover up the real reason he came down here. “You, um, up for a boxing match with Nat and me later?” he asks lamely, rubbing at the back of his neck, awkwardly, feeling that his flush of embarrassment has reached that far.

“Yeah, sure. Should be good to go in….?” he looks at Tony to finish the sentence.

The billionaire coughed lightly, shrugging, “Uh, hour? 90 minutes, tops.”

If he was looking closely enough, Steve would see Bucky bow his head to collect himself before looking back to Steve, who is avoiding both of their gaze for all he's worth.

“That work for you?”

Steve mumbles his agreement and retreats from the room like it’s on fire, scolding himself for taking Natasha’s joke to heart. 

If he wasn’t so busy beating himself up, he’d hear a quiet snort of laughter, just before soundproof doors slide closed behind him. 

 

*****

 

Snorting in laughter, Tony tosses the screwdriver aside and stands from the workbench, revealing unbuttoned jeans just barely hanging on to his hip-bones, doing nothing to conceal the real nature of what he and Bucky had been up to just before FRIDAY warned them that Steve was coming. 

He looks up into pretty blue eyes, alight with amusement, and smiles, “I think that went well.”

Bucky snorts.

“90 minutes, really?” he says with a suggestive grin, closing the arm's access panel and pulling Tony in, one hand quickly finding its place in his pants, more than eager to finish what he’d started.

“If you’re up for it.”  
  
  
  


**Bonus Content:**

~excerpt from 1~~

Bucky’s metal hand slides warmly up Tony’s back, metal fingers digging lightly into his shoulder. The motion causes the arm to make that soft grinding noise Bucky had noticed from time to time. 

“I should really fix that. It would only take a minute.” Tony murmurs into his lips, panting softly as Bucky turns his attention to Tony’s neck, biting the tender skin softly, soothing it with his tongue and giving a disapproving growl. 

“Next time. Busy.”

As he’s lifted to sit on his own workbench, Bucky pressing his body into the space between his legs, Tony lets the issue slide. Busy indeed.

 

~~excerpt from 4~~

Bucky’s shaken from his nightmare, and almost equally so from lying to Steve. 

It isn’t anything personal, he just wants to hold on to what this is without any outside input. This thing with Tony is his everything right now. 

And that’s what leads him down to the workshop in the middle of the night, stepping through the glass doors as they slide open for him.

“Tony.” It’s a little more broken than he means it to be, but it gets the point across. Tony’s head shoots up from where he’s working and in an instant he’s abandoned whatever project to cross the room to Bucky. 

“FRI, Arm Maintenance Protocol.” he mutters to the ceiling as he walks.

“You got it Boss.” she answers dutifully, somberly.

“Nightmare?” comes Tony’s voice, softer and sweeter as he cups Bucky’s face, then tugs on his wrist, leading him over to the large worn sofa in the corner.

Bucky doesn’t even have to acknowledge. Tony already knows, and he stretches out on the couch, pulling Bucky to lay beside him, where the soldier nestles into the mechanic, face pressed into the warm skin of his neck. 

Despite being the smaller of the two, Tony wraps one arm around Bucky, the other combing gently through his sleep-mussed hair. 

“I’ve got you.” he says softly. 


End file.
